I recently needed to profile some C++ code that was taking longer than expected to run. The code was running on a machine without a profiler, so I wrote a handy Timer class that dumps nested timings of each method. You can initialize it to write either to a file or to std::cout if the machine has a console.

I originally thought of this as a ‘Poor Man’s Profiler’, but having used it there are real benefits to taking the trouble to instrument your own code – you can use the file dumps to swiftly compare performance between code changes; you can print out performance statistics and take along to meetings.

The obvious limitation of my solution is that it uses a class static to achieve the levels of nesting, so it won’t work on multi-threaded code – but it was great for my purposes. Here’s some sample code that shows it in action: